Lost... Flashbacks, Star Wars, & Daddy Issues...

I feel like there are two kinds of flashbacks on Lost... the ones thrown in to kill time and reiterate points we've already picked up on (Little Sayid with the chicken), and then the ones that are actually insightful (Kate blowing up her dad's house and then expecting her mom to be grateful). The Miles flashbacks were definitely the latter, especially because he's been a mysterious/minor character up until this point. Opening with the child Miles discovering his unique abilities and struggling to cope was an especially good way of instantly investing the audience more deeply into his character.

Hurley is really great in this episode, bumbling into the wrong place, asking all the obvious questions everyone else ignores, and coming up with keen psychological perceptions. Plus, his movie references the last couple of episodes (first Back to the Future, now Sixth Sense and Empire Strikes Back) are just priceless... Plus, his attempts to facilitate a father-son bond between Miles and Pierre was first hilarious, and then quite moving. But wow, particularly gruesome death for the poor Dharma ditch-digger! Killed by your own cavity filling... that's one cause-of-death even Bones hasn't thought to use yet. This episode made it look a lot more likely to me that the Swan construction site and the untapped energy there is indeed the source of the "incident" upcoming in the season finale...

But, oh my gosh, who would have thought Kate would be the one who couldn't keep a secret? Miss Strong Resourceful Expert-Liar letting drunk, pathetic Roger see through their plan? I really expect more from her.

I have to say, one thing I love about Lost is the sense of interweaving lives... of people who all have a past and wrestle with inner turmoil through the course of the series. Most shows only credit the most important characters with any real depth of emotion, and it's even more rare for those characters to actually evolve or grow. At least this season, the characters are still themselves even as they seem to shift over the course of time. Well, I'd have to make an exception for Jack; the writers have been guilty of character-manipulation so many times with him that I'm not sure which of the Jacks we've seen is actually the real one, and the current whiny, passive version doesn't seem like natural character progression at all lol.

Question answered this episode:
Miles is indeed Pierre's son. I think we had all seen that one coming, but it was nice to have confirmation that Miles is aware as well. Hilarious story about his mom getting in line behind him in the cafeteria!

Ilana is not (?) working for Widmore. Or at any rate, her urgent question, "What lies in the shadow of the statue?" is heard on the lips of her right hand man... who claims to be working *against* Widmore.

Daniel Faraday is not dead! And not crazy either it looks like (absent "in mind" because he lost it), which some people had theorized and I had started to worry was a possibility... Hurrah for Daniel's return to the show!

New Questions:
Are they seriously introducing a third variable to the Ben/Widmore "war is coming" scenario? How on earth do Ilana and the dudes in the black van fit in?

Where has Faraday been? What does he know about the island, and how does his mother fit in?

How is Sawyer going to keep the news from getting out? Or rather, since knocking the dude out and going for rope more or less answers that question in the immediate sense, where/how is he going to keep the guy out of the way without resorting to killing him?

My favorite quote of the episode (besides every other sentence Hurley spoke):
Miles, upon being given the "package": "Is that a bullet in his head? The ditch had a gun...?"

This episode was great, but after the smoke monster and Egyptian mythology of last week, the return to Dharma-ville did seem a little slow. As far as I can tell trying to catch up online today... it looks like next week is a rerun. Boo!